Silver Bullet Sunday No. 8
Good afternoon and thanks for joining me for another Silver Bullet Sunday. I hope everyone out there is doing well!
Last night, I sat out with my neighbor (six feet apart!) and enjoyed a few Japanese Whisky pours while relaxing next to a glowing firepit. It had been a long while since I enjoyed the delicate whiskies of Suntory and Nikka. They are wonderful.
That being said, I am certainly not as young as I used to be, and this morning the sunlight seems a little too bright, and the birds are singing a touch too loud, but I regret nothing! They were delicious! If you find a typo, I blame it on that last pour.
Let’s get to it!
Silver Bullet Sunday
Drinks From Last Week
This past week my wife and I had dinner at her parent’s house. Before we headed over, I took an empty bottle and filled it with four Martinis worth of gin and vermouth, one for each of us.
After arriving and with the Martini mix bottle in hand, I realized I was in a kitchen set up for cooking, not making drinks like mine: no mixing glass, no bar spoon, no strainer. However, there were cocktail glasses, and after a quick dusting, I filled them full of ice to chill.
I knew where there was a large measuring cup and grabbed that to use for my mixing glass. I dumped the gin and vermouth in and topped it off with ice. Then I found a long-handled iced-tea spoon to stir the mix. I was worried about straining the drink, but it turns out a slotted spoon works just fine!
The Martinis were great, and I made sure to keep mental notes of what bar equipment should be gifted to the in-laws for Christmas!
Over the past week, the weather here has been all over the place, with warm afternoons following chilly mornings. With the impending gloom of winter, I find myself sometimes leaning toward brighter drinks in the evening.
I found the Gloria cocktail in A Spot at the Bar: Welcome to the Everleigh: The Art of Good Drinking in Three Hundred Recipes, and it has been a go-to around my house ever since. The finished drink's color is B-E-A-UTIFUL, and the drink is actually an old Trader Vic cocktail from the '40s. Give it a whirl!
Gloria
In a mixing glass
45 ml Gin
15 ml Campari
15 ml Dry Vermouth
15 ml Cointreau
Stir with ice
Strain into a chilled cocktail glass
Lemon peel to garnish
Cocktail Videos
I know, I know…the book is always better than the movie, but so far, Anders Erickson hasn't written a book.
Anders is the man behind Ward Eight, a beloved cocktail bar in Evanston, IL. A few months ago, he started making these fantastic cocktail videos full of information, humor, and killer camera work. I highly recommend watching his channel and subscribing to his content. I learn something new every time.
Here is his newest video all about egg white and aquafaba:
Booze News and Opinions
Wine Sales Up, Winery Profits Down
So it turns out people are spending more in the wine aisle, but that doesn't mean their spending is helping wineries. Wine-Searcher reports:
Consumers in retail stores are paying more for wine: the average price is $11.38 compared to $10.68. Moreover, the fastest-growing categories in retail stores are above $15, with wines between $20 and $25 particularly hot.
In wines ordered direct from wineries, however, the opposite is true: consumers are ordering a lot more wines this way, but they're ordering cheaper wines. In Napa Valley, the average price of a bottle ordered direct in the last five months is about $56, $10 less than a year ago, Brager said. And direct sales of wines over $150 have plummeted.
Moreover, the smallest wineries, fewer than 5000 cases, have struggled the most in selling wines directly to consumers, though these are the wineries that tend to be most reliant on doing so.
Canadian Rye Takes Top Spot as 'World's Best Whiskey'
Jim Murray, the author of Whisky Bible, publishes his top spirit picks every year. This year Alberta Premium's Cask Strenth offering took the top spot. The only time a Candian whisky has received his high mark was in 2015 with Crown Royal's Northern Harvest Rye (and that was a delicious bottle!) Check The Spirits Business for more:
Made from a mix of malted and unmalted rye, Alberta Premium Cask Strength is bottled at 65.1% ABV and was given a score of 97.5 out of 100. It is made at Calgary-based Alberta Distillers from 100% prairie rye mash bills and Rocky Mountain water.
Murray said of the whisky: “A succulence to the oils, balanced perfectly by ulmo and manuka honeys ensure for the most chewable Canadian mouthful possibly ever and yet this is constantly salivating, from the very first nanosecond. Truly world-class whisky from possibly the world’s most underrated distillery. How can something be so immense yet equally delicate?
Detect Counterfeit Booze Without Opening the Bottle
Fake whisky has plagued the Scotch industry for ages. With a higher demand for more expensive and elusive bottlings, fakes are becoming more common. In the past, checking for authenticity meant the bottle had to be opened. Now scientists are using spectroscopy to verify the liquid. Ars Technica has more:
Food scientists and chemists are also interested in using spectroscopy to identify the chemical compounds inside a whisky bottle. This involves shining a laser light into a substance, which scatters the light and breaks it into a spectrum of wavelengths. The different colors represent different wavelengths of light, which correspond to specific chemical compounds, and hence provide a unique "fingerprint" of the substance. The Scotch Whisky Research Institute (SWSRI) in Edinburgh, Scotland, is experimenting with a portable spectrometer that is sufficiently user-friendly to enable workers to measure trace sugar levels (one key characteristic for verifying provenance) with minimal training, as well as distinguishing between whiskies based on other chemical characteristics.
The challenge in applying such techniques to whisky is that the glass bottles themselves produce a large spectral signal, making it difficult to discern the chemical fingerprint of interest (that of the spirit inside). So spectroscopy is usually performed after whiskies have been removed from the bottle.
That's the problem Holly Fleming and her colleagues at St. Andrews have solved with this latest paper. They figured out how to shape the laser light into a ring instead of a focused beam, thereby suppressing the noisy signal from the glass. They used a cone-shaped lens to focus the ring of light onto the bottle, which in turn refocuses said light into the whisky inside. So an expensive bottle of rare Scotch whisky can be tested for authenticity without wasting a single precious drop. Bonus: the same technique can also be used to analyze bottles of gin and vodka. That should make producers and distributors of fine spirits very happy indeed.
Thanks for joining me for another Silver Bullet Sunday. Have a great week, and look forward to The Cocktail Doodle Newsletter on Thursday!